Aug. 8, 1908.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
209 
drawing in into the boat. Now there was a 
splashing in the water behind us, a gleaming 
white form appeared for an instant and made 
a rush to be off again. So sudden was it that 
the captain lost his grip on the line, but imme¬ 
diately he, Lopez and Viejo grabbed it together. 
The contest was of strength against strength, 
three men hauling at the line and four men row¬ 
ing; there was small chance for the fish. It 
was not sport; the men wanted that fish and 
took the easiest means of getting it. The next 
moment it was alongside, and being beaten on 
the head, for none cared to touch a barracuda 
till it had been killed. Then we hauled it on 
board, a great fish looking like an overgrown 
mackerel with jaws which could certainly have 
inflicted savage wounds, and it looked as though 
there might be some truth in the stories told 
by the men of how the barracudas would tear 
a person to pieces, and were more dangerous 
than sharks. We might have caught more, but 
one was enough. The sun was getting low and 
it was past dinner time. The barracuda weighed, 
I should say, twelve to fifteen pounds; a very 
solid fish, thick of body, something over three 
feet long and marked much like a mackerel. 
The clumsy boat was rowed laboriously over 
the rippling waves, then rushed through the low 
surf and pulled up on the sand. Women and 
children crowded about to see, laughing and 
talking. This was the most beautiful time of 
the day. The black flies had disappeared, and 
it was as yet too early for the mosquitoes to 
be about. Lopez and the captain took me to 
the rough house where we would sleep, and 
E XCEPTING only the buffalo, no animal 
appealed to the imagination of the early 
Western travelers so strongly as the wild 
horse. This is not strange. Here was a familiar 
animal of large size, appearing in great numbers, 
swift, free, wild, yet not shy. Often a band of 
horses would c«me up within a few hundred yards 
of a caravan or a small party of travelers, charg¬ 
ing down at great speed in a compact body, and 
then spreading out into a long front would halt 
and stand there with heads up, and long manes 
and tails streaming out upon the wind. No 
wonder these animals appeared beautiful to the 
traveler and no wonder that romantic stories 
grew up about particular horses—frequenting 
certain regions and thus often seen—which were 
remarkable for their beauty or for their speed. 
One of the most famous of the semi-mythical 
animals supposed to have existed in the South¬ 
west was a milk white stallion with black ears, 
a marvelously swift pacer, often pursued, but 
never overtaken and never breaking his pace. 
The tale of this horse, current about 1830 , 
formed the motif of one of the thrilling tales 
of Mayne Reid, which was familiar to the boys 
of a generation or two ago. 
In Forest and Stream in June, 1907 , was 
printed a paper which gave the history of the 
horse in its relations to the Indian, in which 
presently a table was brought, covered with a 
clean white napkin, and the chipechipe were 
served all nicely cooked, some boiled, others had 
been done over in a fat gravy and a small dish 
of them had been prepared with vinegar and 
spices. To eat the little donax was a novelty, 
and I do not recall anything more delicious, a 
delicate flavor superior to either clams, oysters 
or escalops, not tasting really like either, but 
perhaps resembling a combination of the three. 
It would be worth the trip to the coast of the 
Caribbean below the Sierra Nevada de Santa 
Marta just to eat chipe. 
I found on inquiry that these bivalves are 
so abundant that they form one of the principal 
articles of food all along the coast at the foot 
of the mountains. I have looked for them at 
many other places about the Caribbean Sea, but 
at no other place have I found them sufficiently 
abundant to serve as an article of food. After 
the chipechipe some of the fish was brought, 
but it was very ordinary, though the flesh was 
firm, white and rather fat. The people pre¬ 
ferred it to chipechipe and ate it with great 
gusto. 
Night came without much warning, the sun 
went down, light lingered for a few moments, 
but a little after six it was dark, thoroughly 
dark. Soon we were sleepy. The cool shadowy 
expanse, which we knew was the sea opening 
out tranquilly before us, seemed to send up a 
lulling call to sleep. The wind had gone down, 
the night was still and pleasant, hammocks and 
mosquito bars were hung, and then the busy day 
was forgotten. 
was told something of the introduction of the 
horse in America and of the manner in which 
it spread from the Southwest to the North, and 
of the marked influence which its introduction 
had on the Indian people, who up to that time 
had been footmln. Although in later geological 
time many forms of the horse existed in 
America, these had all become extinct before 
the recent period, and primitive man in America 
was a foot traveler, possessing only a single 
domestic animal, the dog. The first horses seen 
by the Indians of the mainland of North 
America were those of the Spanish invaders 
of Mexico, and a few years later Hernando de 
Soto brought horses to Florida and took them 
west to the Mississippi; and again later, Coro¬ 
nado in his march to Quivira, took them across 
the Southwestern plains nearly as far north as 
the Platte River. 
Since—as has been said—the dog had hitherto 
been the only four-footed burden-bearer known 
to the Indian, it was very natural that the name 
given by the various tribes to the horse should 
refer to the animal’s use in transportation, and 
that he should be most often called “dog” in 
combination with some other term, sometimes 
“mysterious dog,” sometimes “big dog” or “elk 
dog” or what not. 
Although when the Indians first saw mounted 
men, they supposed that here was a new strange 
compound animal half quadruped, half man— 
the Centaur of classical mythology—and al¬ 
though at times the horse was worshipped as 
being something above nature, it did not take 
the Indians long to appreciate the importance 
and value of this strange beast and to desire 
to possess them. Obviously the easiest, and in 
fact the only, way to do this was to capture 
them from those who already possessed them, 
and now grew up on the plains a new industry— 
or a new motive for war and a new form of 
warfare—the capturing of horses. 
Horses were owned and bred by the Spaniards 
settled in Mexico, and being without natural 
enemies and so increasing rapidly, they soon 
spread over a wide territory. Tribes of Indians 
adjacent to the Spanish settlements soon began 
to capture and drive off horses for their own 
use. These bred and increased, but almost 
immediately some other tribe adjacent to those 
who had taken the horses would come down 
and take horses from the original captors and 
carry them off to their country, whence they 
would again be removed by enemies of some 
other tribe. In this way the dispersal of horses 
from South to North was astonishingly rapid. 
Most of the Mexican horses were branded, yet 
each year many must have been overlooked, and 
a hundred years ago the plains of the South¬ 
west supported a great multitude of wild horses; 
no wilder, in fact, it is true, than the branded 
animals of the Mexicans, but with their skins 
unmarked by the iron. 
Although the Indians of the Southwestern 
plains supplied themselves with horses very 
largely by raiding their Indian or white neigh¬ 
bors to the South, yet they made a business also 
of capturing these wild horses. 
In catching wild horses on the Arkansas and 
further south, the Southern Cheyennes caught 
chiefly two-year-old horses—colts or fillies. 
They avoided taking old liorses because these 
were hard to break, and because also they 
were likely later to stray away and become 
wild again. Young horses were easy to break. 
Trips for catching horses were usually made in 
the spring when the ground was more or less 
soft, and it was hard for the horses to run, 
and when, too, the wild horses were poor and 
weak after the hardships of the winter. The 
horses ridden in this chase were selected long- 
winded animals, and after they had been used 
to some extent for this purpose, they came to 
know what was required of them, just as the 
trained buffalo horse learned to know his part 
in the buffalo chase. 
Trips for catching horses were made by small 
bodies of men, from six to twenty-five or thirty, 
who often were out from camp for a long time. 
Such parties went prepared for whatever might 
turn up. They supplied themselves with food 
from the game found on the prairie, and as the 
country through which they passed in looking 
for horses was likely to be traversed by many 
other Indians who might be hostile, the horse 
catchers must always be prepared for war. In 
those early days, the Cheyennes were likely to 
meet parties of Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, 
Apache and perhaps other Indians, all of whom 
were their enemies and all ready for an attack. 
Like most other wild animals, the horses were 
very local in their habits. At certain seasons 
of the year they fed on a particular range, and 
Wild Horses and the Indians 
By GEO. BIRD GRINNELL 
